The Flächennutzungsplan is the key instrument of land use planning at the local level in Germany. At the same time, and especially regarding current problems in planning practice, it can serve as a prime example for the unjustified loss of importance of formal plans in general. Facing the need for coping with present challenges of urban development, the Flächennutzungsplan is criticised because of its lengthy procedures and inflexible contents. Consequently, new approaches to revise its basic model have to be discovered. In the past decades, several selective amendments to the model of the Flächennutzungsplan were carried out. In addition to this, there exist remarkable developments in other European countries: Recently, for instance, in the English planning system the Local Development Framework has been introduced. It is characterised by its modular composition and is expected to be more flexible. Up to now, a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the current model of the Flächennutzungsplan has not been provided. Furthermore, and in order to enable a future model of the Flächennutzungsplan to be effective, a general debate on the understanding of local land use planning and its outcome is necessary. The goal of this thesis is the systematic deduction and analysis of the current model of the Flächennutzungsplan in order to identify how it can be further developed to enhance the governance capability of the formal plan contents. In this context, the results of an examination of the English Local Development Framework are integrated. The main findings of this thesis read as follows: Despite of several amendments to the model of the Flächennutzungsplan, some of its original drawbacks still remain and, thus, lead to a plan that is not able to handle the existing and future challenges of urban development. In particular, the current model does not sufficiently consider spatio-temporal aspects of urban development including the analysis of alternative directions of development. Furthermore, the analysis of local land use planning in England shows a basic transferability of various valuable elements to the German system. The resulting amendments to the model of the Flächennutzungsplan suggested in this thesis provide the opportunity to further develop the formal plan to a more modular, dynamic and strategic instrument of planning at the local scale. They focus on the new format of the plan as a portfolio of designed and written, formal and informal parts and the integration of spatio-temporal and strategic aspects of urban development. Last but not least, the understanding of local land use planning and its outcome is changed in a way that the plan and its contents do no longer represent the single canonic and final product of the formal planning process, but become subject of continuous review and evolvement.